Nautical
by FerrisWheeling
Summary: Eridan and Feferi are just going to sit back, relax, and enjoy the clusterfuck that is their relationship. Fluff-ish. ONESHOT


_Oh yes. Such a creative title, right? _

In brutal truth, the ocean scares you a little. It's just so big and wild, and lacks the general symmetry that you have grown to appreciate on land. You would rather die than admit this, of course, because…well, you're a seadweller. How ridiculous, a seadweller who's nervous about the sea. It's stupid and you know that you really should get over it all already. No matter how you reassure yourself, you still feel slight trepidation about the ocean. It's not a heart-stopping, sweaty-palms sort of fear, but more of a soft and polite fear. A fearful respect, maybe.

You will, of course, brave the unconditioned expanse of the ocean some times. You secretly prefer being on land, but every time a big storm is darkening the sky with oily clouds, you head down to the shore; more specifically, a quaint lagoon that is mostly cut off from the wandering eye by vegetation and rock formations. She usually surfaces there when the rain starts falling and invites you in. You always give a short monologue about how you really should be doing this or that, how this is a stupid venture in the scheme of things that will bring about absolutely no changes to either of your lives, and then you shrug and hang up your scarf and shoes and jump into the lagoon with her.

The two of your swim out far away from land. You have a gnawing anxiety in your gut but you stomp it down for her. The ocean is jittery with energy from the sky and the waves are already getting big. Most of the creatures have bedded down on the sandy floor, knowing better than to let themselves be thrown around by the storm. During the waiting period before the huge waves rise, she glubs at you about this particularly multicolored cuttlefish she found the other day, or how she's adopted a family of seahorses and lets them curl their tails around her fingers. She says that they tickle. You smile at her a little, nodding along to her aquatic stories. You don't really care about her new sea pets, but you will listen with proper etiquette because you just really like her sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. One could even say most, or all, of the time. But you almost never get to see her; she's too busy keeping her lusus quiet, you're too busy trying to figure out how one does genocide. And she usually gets angry at you, and sometimes you blow up at her and won't talk to her for days. In the end, of course, you're just two fish kids trying to figure each other out.

"Oooh, can you _feel_ it?" She giggles suddenly, interrupting her own tale about the time an octopus got stuck in her hair.

"Feel what?" You ask. You draw in a deep drag of water through your gills but do not notice anything different. She's always been much more perceptive about things like this, and a lot of other things too, and just everything, really.

"The storm's about to break!" She's buzzing with excitement now. "Come on, let's get up to the surface so we can catch the waves." She grabs your hand and kicks up. She is a much stronger swimmer than you, obviously, and you struggle to keep your arm in its socket. The two of you break the surface at the same time. You immediately switch to breathing through your nose, but she, as always, tries to breathe through her gills at first. It makes a dry sucking sound, she looks startled and coughs a little, and then remembers she's above water and uses her mouth to take in the stormy air. She blushes faintly at her ineptitude.

It is raining much harder now, so hard that there is very little difference between being above water and below water. The waves are swelling and frothing around you; you have to fight to keep each other in sight. You look around and your chest feels tight when you can't spot land anywhere. Just black, rabid water and bruised horizon as far as you can see. But she's smiling a thousand watt smile and it relaxes you. If she can be happy, then you can be happy too.

You both swim around, just playing really. You duck under crashing waves and ball yourself up so you don't jam your spine under the pressure, and are shot down, down, down into the darkness as the wave falls over you. You are never completely at ease out here, never will be either, but the sight of her being so free and the two of you not having the words to yell at each other makes it all okay. You realize it is sad how badly you two are getting along lately; if you aren't yelling at her, then she's shooting down all your ideas and revoking your fish pun privileges. You've both said some pretty horrible things to the other, things that you'll never forget and always regret, and from time to time you realize that the only thing preventing you from hitting her is that you rarely see her face to face, that most of your arguments are via chat. It makes you feel despicable.

Then things like this happen. Out in the frothy ocean that eats all your sins away for the night. You can coexist and be okay.

Things like this don't happen often enough.

The waves swell larger and larger, until you stop ducking under them in fear that they will crush you into a little fishstick. She still does, though, because she knows where her limits are; seadwellers can withstand extreme temperatures and pressure, due to their usual environment, but you don't know how much you can take because you've never been to the bottom of the ocean like she has.

You lose sight of her for a few minutes, and then she suddenly pops up next to you. Her hair is slicked down her body like a shiny cape and her fins are sticking straight out. She's smiling in a way that many find intensely unsettling, showing every last row of her needle teeth, but you find it endearing. When she does it she looks like a little kid who's trying to be cute, but ends up being terrifying instead, which, in a roundabout way, just makes them all the cuter.

"There's a _huuuuge_ wave started out there!" She jerks her thumb over her shoulder, and then grabs both of your hands, pulling. "It's going to be awesome. We can catch it while it's still small and ride it!" She's already darting off before you can have a say in the matter. You follow her, struggling a little against the indecisive currents swirling around you. You always keep your eyes trained on her ridiculously bright skirt and the millions of gold bangles on her ankles and wrists, catching the light from the occasional lightning bolt and flashing so bright that it almost blinds you. She stops abruptly and you smash into her. She smiles and slaps the back of your head teasingly. "Here it is!"

Sure enough, there is an absolutely monstrous wave rising above you. She leads you around it, to the back, and you climb up. It absorbs other, smaller waves into it, building itself up faster than you can climb it. Finally, though, you reach the top and coast, panting, and losing your dignity as you return her terrifying shark smile like an overjoyed idiot.

When the wave starts curling downwards into itself, you both immediately drop down through it. You fall through the air, tumbling like acrobats with the sea closing in around you on all sides. For a moment, you two exist in a little pocket of air surrounded by solid water, salt and mist stinging your eyes and making your nostrils burn. Then the wave crashes completely and jettisons you deep under the water. Your ears pop with the sudden descent and you think you might have left your stomach back up in the air. You see her far away, twisting around in the water like you know you are doing as well, and you swim over to her, grabbing her up and kissing along her neck. When she breathes out, the bubbles from her gills make you feel like sneezing.

You've only ever been able to kiss her on these stormy sea escapades. No other time feels right. Well, if you had your way, you would be kissing her just about every day, but you know she doesn't feel like that about you. You have to hold out for these sweet little moments underwater, when you're both just so happy that you could burst, and you both relearn the reason that you are moirails. A kiss between moirails is not an uncommon thing, as a simple gesture of strong platonic love, but most of the time, she knows that a kiss from you wouldn't be entirely platonic, and you know it too. Underwater changes a lot of things, and makes you entertain the idea that maybe you could be her moirail, and nothing more, if it would make her happy and meant that things could turn out okay between you two.

Eventually, you end up back at the shore, taking the journeys in intervals of riding waves and kisses. You trudge up the beach, sand sticking to your saturated clothes, and flop down on your back, breathing heavily. You're sore right now, and you now that come morning, you probably won't be able to even roll out of bed. And you still have to go back to the lagoon and gather up your scarf and shoes…ugh.

She stays kneeled in the surf, her hair melting into the black water around her. She watches you quietly, smiling a mere ghost of the grin she bore earlier. You're both exhausted and want to rest, but don't want to leave each other's company so soon. Sometimes you find yourself wishing you would never see her again, but then other times, like right now, you never want her to leave.

After a few minutes, she crawls onto the beach and lies down beside you. The rain hits your face, trickling into your ears and pooling at the base of your throat. You can't hear anything over the angry sound of the ocean but you can almost feel her heart from where you are. You stay that way a very long time, so long that you begin to wonder if you've fallen asleep or not, and then the great purple thunderheads recoil from the horizon to reveal a rising sun. You really should get going; don't want to be caught out in the sun.

"Bye, Fef, I really should get goin'." You sit up, brushing the sand off your hands. You lean over her and kiss her on both of her cheeks. She smiles and gets you on the lips.

"Alright." She sits up too, shaking out her hair. "See you later, Eridan. And…that was really fun. I'm glad you came out tonight." She smiles and you return it.

"Yeah. It was pretty nice."


End file.
